Rojadirecta.org

Rojadirecta.org was created on April 11th, 2007. The site was recently seized by the US Government’s ICE division. The domain’s expiration date is April 11, 2012, though it should be noted that this domain was renewed April 12th, 2011. The domain was in ICE’s control at that time so it appears that ICE renewed the domain.

Rojadirecta.org was a site that listed links for a lot of sporting events. Baseball, football, soccer, basketball, hockey, and more. Rojadirecta listed a wide variety of live streaming sports links. The site did not stream games themselves but rather acted as a link consolidator. Tons of sports fans (mostly from outside the US) had Rojadirecta as their top destination when they wanted to watch live sports online.

Rojadirecta has been to court over their service. They are based in Spain and have been to Spanish court twice over the legality of their site and sharing links to live broadcasted sporting events. The Spanish courts found them to be legal and Rojadirecta was allowed to operate their business. When the US government began seizing domain names from sports streaming sites and sports streams linking sites, Rojadirecta.org and Rojadirecta.com were both seized by ICE. Even though the Spanish courts found the site legal, the US agency still seized the domains. This could potentially create some international friction when it comes to one country confiscating the domains of citizens in another country. The only reason the US was able to seize Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org is because both the .com and .org registries are maintained by US based companies. If you look at it from a legal perspective, Rojadirecta.org was acting within the laws of their country, they were paying taxes on their earnings and operating as a normal business would. So the US seizure of their domains (if they shut down operations) would have caused Spain some tax revenue. It seems like the US is stepping out of their jurisdiction with the domain seizure and many pundits have commented that the maintenance of the .com and .org registries, while based within the rule of a US company, is not supposed to be a US jurisdiction but they are supposed to be maintained here for the world.

While Rojadirecta has come out challenging the domain seizures they wasted no time in getting back online at the site www.Rojadirecta.es . The .es extension is the domain extension for Spain. By having their site on the .es registry there is probably no chance that the US government can take this domain down.